Traded to the Desert Sheikh

“Kiss me,” he suggested, darkly, “and you will find out exactly how pleasing I can be, azizty.”

She didn’t laugh, though he felt it there in the air between them, music and magic, as if she had. She hooked her other hand around his neck and stretched herself up toward him, and he let her. He waited.

Amaya hovered there for a moment, her mouth a scant breath from his, her dark gaze solemn. Kavian remembered, suddenly, their first meeting. That same look in her eyes as they’d met his for the first time. The promises she’d made him then.

And that next morning, when her brother had come to tell him that she had fled the palace, her whereabouts unknown.

“If you break another vow, Amaya, I will not be quite so forgiving.” He hadn’t meant to speak. He hardly knew his own voice when he did.

But her lips curved slightly, only slightly, and she didn’t pull away. “Has this been your version of forgiving?”

He could hardly hear her over the thunder of his own heart.

“You’ll understand if I find that confusing.”

“You are the only living creature I have ever forgiven anything.”

It was a confession, gruff and unexpected. And he should not have made it to her, Kavian knew, but it mattered to him that she had not looked at him with horror drenching those lovely eyes once he’d told her his story. It mattered to him that she’d sought to defend him instead.

He could not for the life of him understand why it mattered.

Why she did.

Only that she had from the start. That she made him believe he could have a different sort of ending than the one he was certain he deserved.

“I’m honored,” she said quietly now, like nothing so much as another promise, one more solemn vow, and then she kissed him.

She was as sweet as she was enticing, and he drank her in. He let her explore him, tasting him and teasing him, kissing him again and again until he could feel the catch in her breath.

And then, when he couldn’t take it any longer, he slid his hands deep into her hair, he hauled her against him and he took control.

If the tent had ignited around them, he wouldn’t have noticed.

He simply lifted her to him so that she wrapped her long legs around his hips and her arms around his neck, and still he plundered her mouth. He angled his jaw and he took the kiss deeper, kissing her as if his life depended on it. As if he could kiss her forever. As if time had stopped for precisely this.

And then, when she was making those wild little sounds in the back of her throat that were more precious to him than all the jewels in his possession, in the whole of his treasury and all of his museums besides, he carried her over to the bed and laid her down on the soft cloud of linens.

He stretched out above her, pressing her deeper into the bed and taking her mouth again. And he kept on kissing her. He could not seem to taste her enough. He could not seem to slake his own thirst.

Her hands moved all over him as if she was learning him with her fingertips, soaking him in. He shifted, slipping a hand down to cup the sweet heat of her in his palm. He held her there until she moaned, and only then did he move, slipping beneath the lacy underthings she wore and thrusting his fingers deep into her molten core.

It was his name she cried when she shook around him, and Kavian hoarded that to him like another vow. Her voice against the night, brighter than the lanterns that lit the space around them, etched deep inside him like letters carved into the stone of his own heart.

He was filled then with a kind of wild desperation he’d never felt before. He needed to be inside her, or die of it, and he hardly knew what to make of it when he saw his hands shook slightly as he rid her of her little slip and those lacy panties she wore, then peeled off his own boxer briefs.

Nothing mattered but that slick initial thrust, so deep inside her they seemed more like one, and even that was not enough.

It will never be enough, a voice within him whispered.

And just then, he didn’t care.

He gathered her close. His arms wrapped around her, her mouth against his neck. And he rocked into her, slow and easy. A pace he kept even when she started to shift, to writhe. To move her own hips against his, trying to buck at him and make him go faster.

He laughed, a dark jubilation that seemed to come from every part of him, while she dug her fingers so hard into the skin of his back that he could feel her nails.

And still he held that torturous pace. A slow thrust in, a long drag back. Again and again, driving them both insane.

“Please,” she began to whisper. “Please, Kavian. Please.”